A week ago, on sunday early morning, the police evicted the non-citizens camp at the Rindermarkt. Some supporters tried to stop them. Had I been there, I don‘t know if would have joined those supporters. Here’s why.

By now, I think that the hunger strikers were not in grave danger, and apparantly at least some did not receive any medical attention. But, knowing what I knew a week ago, shortly before the eviction, based on the communication of the non-citizens – I had assumed that several of the hunger strikers were in danger of dying of hunger or thirst. Then, the police is the lesser of two evils. I don‘t want to come across as cynical and I am aware that non-citizens have even more reasons to distrust the cops than everyone else, and may face the danger of deportation. Still, I would not actively prolong a situation were someone whose struggles are close to mine might die.

The hunger strikers know what they are doing – but I, too, have to know what I‘m doing if I am to take any active part! With the paralell structures of supporters and non-citizens, the intransparency and the lack of communication, I found it difficult to impossible to somehow asses the situation.
Again, this is what I knew a week ago without beeing close to the matter. I assume, or rather hope, that the comrades who tried to block the police knew more than me and made an informed decision to protect the hunger strike. But you, the supporters, sort of claim to not make political decisions: The declaration of the supporters states that it is „our principle to act soleyly in a supporting manner“ and that it is „not our protest.“ I think that’s plain wrong – of course it’s your protest if you are an active part of it. And I think saying one is „only supporting“ is dishonest, you can‘t claim that for example standing or sitting in the way of the cops in the moment of eviction is anything but your decision – and that you don‘t share the responsibility for what happens in the unlikely case that you succeed .

Maybe I framed the problem too much as a matter of rational choices and clear cut dcisions – I know that in situations like this decisions are made at the spur of the moment, everyone misses at least a night’s sleep or is close to burnout and everything is frantic improvisation.
This struggle continues, I felt the need to voice some subjective doubts and reservations now. At the end of the day we can‘t achieve anything without trusting each other and our selves as political subjects. The weirdness of the dual strucures and the strange approach of positioning one as „only supporter“ don‘t help. And we still need to somehow win this thing!

The concept of differential inclusion also points to the fact that violence is not only associated with exclusion. It points to the fact that also the production of regimes of social and political inclusion is crisscrossed by violence. So from this point of view it is quite clear that we are at unease with the kind of binary between exclusion and inclusion, citizens and non-citizens that has also shaped many debates and many practices among activists over the last decade. We are trying to go beyond this kind of binary because we think that this binary is not politically productive. It tends to reproduce divides within societies at large that must be contested.

Int: It is good that you mention this because the hunger strikers in Munich define themselves as non-citizens and they are very strong in their rhetoric about it. What do you think are the potentials of such articulation on the one hand, but also the underlying dangers of keeping this dichotomy of citizen/non-citizen intact?

S.M.: First of all I must say that I will not criticize what the hunger strikers in Munich are saying these days. This is an important principle for me. I never criticize people who are struggling, people who are putting their life at play so I only respect them. I am thankful to them for what they are doing. I think it is important to keep in mind that this particular hunger strike is part of a kind of cycle of struggles over the last few years in Europe. There were hunger strikes and other forms of struggles in many European countries including for instance Greece, Italy, and Austria. It is very interesting to see this kind of circulation of struggles on European level, this kind of circulation of practices, languages, and so on. I think this is really a kind of important chance for everybody who is interested in radically rethinking the European space as a space of freedom and equality, as I was saying before. At the same time I have to say that in my own work and the kind of collective debates I have been participating over the last years, there has been a growing awareness of let’s say the dangers but also kind of tricky implications of an emphasis on the status of non-citizens and more generally the excluded. I think it could be interesting to go a bit to the details of the history of this, rethinking of the sans papiers movement in France in 1996 and the kind of reproduction of that particular movement in many European countries in the following years. While I participated of course in these movements and struggles, and I think that they were really crucial in order to open up a new space for mobilization of migrants in Europe, I also think that this kind of exclusive emphasis on the status on the one hand, the movements and struggles on the other hand of the so-called “illegal” migrants is a bit dangerous because it paradoxically reproduces one of the main aspects of migration regimes: this division between “illegal” and “legal” migrants. While we know very well through our research that there is a continuum of subjective positions that crosses and continuously reworks the divide between “legality” and “illegality.” So I think that both from the point of view of research and from the point of view of political action what would be crucially important is precisely to work on and against this continuum, this process of production at the same time of “legality” and “illegality.” To challenge not simply a particular kind of position produced by that system but the “rationality” of the system itself.

schengendangle is the Blog of people like me, who come to Europe with the hope to finaly escape and find a new home. We are refugees trying to reach the less worse country, the one where we have a chance to get asylum. To achieve that, we are forced to cross the external borders of Europe and the internal ones. We cannot travel on the normal way like a tourist. We don’t have passports. In this world we have to travel in the darkness, in small dinghies, hidden inside and under lorries and by whatever means you might think of or you might not imagine at all.
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This Blog is the attempt to fight back against inequalities by telling our stories. The Schengen Treaty gives some people the possibility of free movement in Europe but for others it makes it more difficult if not impossible to travel. It takes our human rights as people only because we are not European citizens. Dangle we call it when we hide underneath a lorry, between the tires – we the unseen of Europe.